We were at an indoor play gym as part of our constant battle to keep our little extrovert entertained on the weekend. PH picked up a local paper to flip through while we sat in the overwhelmingly loud atmosphere.

“Hey, the Quidditch Global Games are in Vancouver,” he said.

“Like, where people run around on brooms?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, we need to see that. When is it.”

He scanned the article. “Today!”

So we packed Owl in the car and headed down to see.

It took us a while to find it. International competition not withstanding, the Quidditch Global Games had not attracted a large crowd. Most of the spectators were family and friends of the players.

We were geeking out.

“They have MERCHANDISE!” I said, running over to the booth. There were shirts from many of the international teams. After much hemming and hawing I bought shirt from the Mexican team, where were newcomers this year and could only afford to bring half of their team.

The shirt says “Viva Quidditch, cabrones!” and really, how often do you get a chance to buy a shirt that says (loosely translated) “long live Quidditch, bitches!” in Spanish?

We showed up at the perfect time, because Canada was just starting their match against Australia. We watched as all players bowed their head while the “Snitch” – a heavyset dude in yellow with a sock hanging out of the back of his pants – ran off of the field to hide.

When the Snitch was out of a sight, a whistle blew and all hell broke loose. The players grabbed their brooms, mounted them, and then fought to get a “Quaffle” (which, confusingly, was white) through the other team’s hoops. Since they were all holding onto their brooms, all throwing and catching was done one handed.

It all sounds pretty silly, until you watch it played.

This sport is FULL BODY CONTACT, guys. They were tackling each other like mad. We saw at least one person carted off of the field in a stretcher, and several more down for a good 5-10 minute count. This isn’t about some silly geeks LARPing in a soccer field. It’s like Rugby with extra balls and literary roots.

While Chasers fought one-handed over the Quaffle, Beaters were throwing dodge balls at the players. Whenever one of them got tagged by a “bludger” they had to dismount and run back and touch their hoops before they could re-enter play.

After 18 minutes the Snitch returned to the pitch and then the play became (if possible) even more intense. The seekers tried to tackle the Snitch, who wasn’t afraid to knock them down repeatedly, while opposing team members tried to interfere with play. Meanwhile, the Chasers are still trying to get the Quaffle through the hoops while also helping out their Seeker.

You don’t even know what to watch – keep your eyes on the Snitch and miss another incredible goal? Or watch the Quaffle and miss the capturing of the Snitch?

Craziness.

We were able to stay long enough to watch Canada come in third. We had to take Owl home to bed before the final match, which the USA ended up winning (Muggle Quidditch originated in the U.S, and the page for the international association is actually called USquidditch.com, which bothers me. Hopefully as international teams increase, there will be a truly international page set up).

Some friends of ours who are both sporty AND geeky also came out to watch.

“Why don’t we play this?” one of them asked.

Good question.

PH has been missing sports in his life for many years.

In his high school yearbook, you can find his face in pretty much every team photo. Soccer, baseball, football, curling… he did it all.

In University he refereed several sports. But it’s surprisingly hard to get involved in sports here. There’s a big population and a lot of demand. When we moved to B.C. he tracked down the local baseball league and was rejected several times – they just didn’t have room for more players.

He did curling for a year or two, but since he had to take what he could get, he was shunted onto a team of lackluster players who he never quite jived with. He gave up in frustration after two seasons.

So then he decided to try refereeing. He got qualified as a soccer referee, but was only every called out to a few games, earning a grand total of a hundred dollars over a whole season. The next year they only called once. He didn’t bother re-certifying the next year.

Last year he decided to get certified as a softball referee. It cost us $150 and they never called him at all.

Quidditch, on the other hand, could be a whole other ball game.

PH tracked down a Quidditch referee to ask how he could get involved and they practically leaped on him. Turns out that there was a team in Burnaby that was looking for players, and they are short on referees.

By the time we left the field he had exchanged emails with several people and they were hoping to see him on the Quidditch pitch next Saturday. Today he downloaded the 150 page rule book and began memorizing it.

Quidditch rules, by the way, are awesome.

Not only is it a delightfully geeky and yet truly challenging sport to play, it is also heartwarmingly unlike other sports.

Besides being the only sport to involve multiple balls in play at once, the International Quidditch Association is dedicated to inclusivity and equality.

Teams MUST be co-ed, and it specifically addresses transgender issues in the rulebook. The co-ed rule reads:

Each team [is] to have at least two players on the field who identify with a different gender than at least two other players. The gender that a player identifies with is considered to be that player’s gender, which may or may not be the same as that person’s sex.

That is AWESOME.

The rule goes on to acknowledge that some players may not identify as male OR female, and that is okay, too.

If that rule wasn’t enough to make Perfect Husband and I fall head over heels in love with Quidditch (we consider ourselves ardent LGBTQ allies), our hearts were entirely won over when we learned that Quidditch also had a decree called Title 9 3/4 (a play on Title IX) which is devoted specifically to gender equality in the sport.

It’s so awesome, and I’m proud that PH is getting involved. I can cheer on Quidditch in a way that I just can’t with other sports. The literary roots of the sport generate some interest in me, and the gender-equality factor makes me want to support it.

1- You must post the rules2- Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post3- Create eleven new questions to ask the people you’ve tagged4- Tag eleven people with a link to your post5- Let them know they’ve been tagged

You see, PH had it all planned out. He wanted the Canucks to go to game 6, because otherwise we would miss the party of the century. Can you imagine, the Canucks win the Stanley Cup and WE’RE IN NOVA SCOTIA?

Our plane was due to arrive in Vancouver at around 1:30. PH was going to gather a couple of friends and head downtown, so he could stand in the crowd and roar with triumph as the Canucks secured their final win. He has never forgotten the feeling in the crowd when he attended the 2010 gold medal hockey game, and this was his chance to recreate it.

So we land in Toronto, and find our gate. Then a Westjet employee makes his way to the desk and announces that our flight has been cancelled.

That’s right, not delayed. CANCELLED.

We had sudden flashbacks to our return from our honeymoon, when we were stranded at Gatwick airport when Zoom Airlines began to fold. That time we ended up staying over night, and only by sheer luck managed to finagle our way onto another plane the next day, no thanks to the airline that stranded us there.

I was bringing lobster home for a friend who is taking care of Beloved Dog and putting up with his chicken-bone-eating habit, and I was thinking “Oh, man, what if the lobster don’t make it??”

Thankfully, though, Westjet is NOT Zoom. I have been an enthusiastic fan of Westjet ever since I first flew with them (when I had a whole row to myself, and the captain told us a Newfie joke over the loudspeaker), and they didn’t let me down today. Unlike Zoom, they told us WHY the flight had been cancelled: the plane had been struck by lightning and was not safe to fly.

Fair enough.

Then they gave us 30 dollars in meal vouchers (Zoom only gave us 8 pounds, which was about enough to buy a bag of crisps for each of us from the expensive Gatwick concessions counter) and got us on another flight leaving in a couple of hours.

Which was great for the lobster, but not so great for our schedule.

We ended up arriving at 4 pm, only an hour before the game started. By the time we got our bags, loaded them into the car, and fought traffic all the way home, it was three minutes into the game, and according to the radio, the Bruins were already up 2-0. PH suffers from that sports-fan belief that one has to be watching the game in order for one’s team to be successful, so his face was grim as we pulled into the driveway.

We unloaded the car, got into the house, and turned on the TV.

The game was 4-0. In the four or five minutes of game time that PH had missed due to delayed planes, traffic, fate, etc, good old Bobby Lu had allowed 4 goals. FOUR!

PH did not go downtown. The Canucks did not bring home the Stanley cup.

His obsession with sports is one of those humanly flaws that I tolerate because of his general perfection as a spouse.

I didn’t grow up in a sports-oriented home. When I was little my father would sit on the floor with his legs crossed and I would sit in the nest they made and we would watch golf together and I would recognize Greg Norman by his hat and cheer when Fuzzy Zoeller went into the rough.

That’s about it for sports in my family. I don’t do sports.

I like hockey all right. I enjoyed playing street hockey as a kid, possibly out of a sense of patriotism since I was a Canadian in an American International School. I believed that I must be good at hockey because of my nationality, and I made a great goalie.

Now, living in Vancouver you hear a lot of hockey talk. Vancouverites are all rabid Canucks fans, which I respect.(I was a Canucks fan before I even came out to BC because of Ivan Hrvatska). Being a Canucks fan is sort of like being a fan of the Boston Red Sox. The Canucks have a great team but they never win the Stanley Cup.

“How about that game last night?” is as common a conversation starting point as “so, it sure is raining, isn’t it?”

I can handle the hockey, even if I tend to say things like “Stanley Crosby is from Dartmouth, right?”

Football, though, I don’t do.

Perfect Husband’s family is American.

From the start of the football season, our cable is plugged in (PH and I get free cable but don’t usually take advantage of it, but right around football season, it comes back on again…). PH watches every CFL and NFL game that they will televise on basic cable.

I can’t get into it.

They run and they fall down.

Then they run.

Then they fall down.

PH says it’s chess with 300 pound men, but I can’t keep track of the action enough. They run. They fall down.

I keep telling PH that I would watch more sports if they just made them more interesting. Right now, as it is, the sports just aren’t exciting enough to get me to tune into them voluntarily. When I make suggestions, though, PH tends to whimper and cringe as though I have just sexually molested his childhood.

So, in honor of the fact that I am going to be a Super Bowl Sunday Widow anyway today, here are my suggestions to the sports world:

1. The NHL Winter Classic should not take place on a regulation sized rink built in a football stadium. It should take place on a rink that comprises the entire football field. Goals and similar demarcations should be made to scale, the players should be given novelty-sized sticks and they should play with a giant puck the size of a car tire. It could be called the Lillipution Winter Classic.

Even better if they hold it in Canada, because CFL fields are bigger than those piddly NFL fields.

2. There should also be a Summer Classic, wherein the top scoring hockey players of the season should play each other in an intense game of table hockey with full commentary and good macro lenses on the video cameras.

3. Sports commentators should no longer give the appearance of trying to outdo each other in a Who’s Uglier contest. In place of the gap teeth, bizrre chins and eye-blinding clothing, all colour commentary should be performed by Isaiah Mustafa, in bath towel.

4. Points should be deducted as part of penalties. So a game could hypothetically end up with negative scores.

5. The duller sports, like Baseball and Golf, should be covered by Foley artists with entertaining “boing!” and “wawawa” noises.

6. Basketball should be played on a giant trampoline and the nets should be much higher.

7. Tiny land mines should be placed randomly in a football/soccer field, which go off unexpectedly during the game. Not enough to hurt anyone, just enough to knock someone off of their feet with an explosion of dirt just as they catch the ball.

8. In Baseball, introduce dogs to the field.

9. In Curling, make rocks explode when contact is too jarring, so you have to tap a rock gently in order to keep it in play. This will prevent those clean games which are so boring to watch.

10. Sports teams should have political affiliations, so we can root for a team based on our personal belief system. That way, instead of it just being the Bears vs the Packers, it could be the Homophobic Pro-Lifers vs the Universal Health Care Soppy Liberals. This would really help create better stakes when watching two groups of men play games with each other at two in the afternoon on a Sunday.

Also, as a general advisory to the sporting world, I would like to see more:

Cheese Rolling (people tumbling head over heels down a steep hill for the sake of cheese? What’s not to love?).